Unremarkable
by Saulie
Summary: Dômeki never saw anything that others didn’t have the ability to see.


Watanuki saw them: the facelessintangible _entities _that filled the books in Dômeki's grandfather's library, oozing from the pages and creeping into the air like little demons awaiting their chance to strike. _Hovering. _To him, they were always invisible. They always had been. He'd always known they were there, but hadn't given toomuch thought to it. He'd just known that there were things he had yet to understand, things he wasn't _meant _to understand, that he would confront if he had to and damn well not before then.

Watanuki _saw _them.

That was…interesting.

Dômeki didn't possess any supernatural powers of sight.

Dômeki never saw anything that others didn't have the ability to see.

He'd seen Watanuki, back when he had never met Yûko Ichihara, that tangle of over-exaggerated gestures with glasses and worried eyes, glancing furiously in his direction after some provocation or another. He'd watched Watanuki like a hawk and undoubtedly it annoyed the hell out of him. Dômeki couldn't have cared less. Dômeki had thought from an early age, rather practically, that he could definitely go far by mastering the ever-elusive art of 'whatever'. An area in which Watanuki was a spectacular failure. –He'd been fascinated by the way Watanuki's expressions were so unbelievably honest and _obvious—_

_--_and the way he would occasionally glance at the air as if it'd taken on a character of its own, would whirl around to face emptiness as if it were the source of a sound that no one else could hear.

Why hadn't anyone seen it?

Eh, because they were stupid.

Dômeki narrowed his sight until it became a finite wire from his bow to the target—ready, aim, you know the rest. It was just a matter of seeing the path from one to the other. Not that hard. It took practice. Focus. (Watanuki'd probably have been terrible at it.) Now, Dômeki sometimes had occasion to fire with no arrow in sight at something he could not see. That was fine. The line that led from Watanuki's often horrified stare was easy enough to follow; he could follow it to a specific point where _something _had to be and the rest was just the third side of a triangle.

-

Himawari never saw it: it being _reality, _or the truth, or what-have-you—or if she did, she never gave any sign; just kept that dazzling smile on set to the tunes of light, melodic laughter. Like every time she looked at them—both of them—she saw something that brought her some kind of happiness. To her, they were always joking. The best of friends, oh, right, _that _was likely. _I just love your double comedy routine! _but who was he to deny it? That was always Watanuki's job, the denial. He was better at it. It's was Dômeki's subsequent task to roll his eyes and wince at the decibel level (_honestly) _and, in a way, that sort of confirmed Himawari's theory.

But whatever.

That was the way things _were. _

Dômeki just saw things as they were, looking for a kind of constancy; he didn't have any traffic with the past or the future or the parallel.

He'd seen Himawari, back when she started coming to their school—he'd glanced briefly at her indefatigably cheerful expression and shrugged. Just another girl. He saw quite a lot of girls. Recently, they had come to flock around when he had archery practice; it had really been rather distracting. Himawari did sometimes. She was a little different than the others, maybe. He never really paid much attention. There were a lot of people in the world and he could not watch all of them, for God's sake.

Then one day he followed Watanuki's glance and knew it was different, because this time there was actually a visible end to it: two long pigtails, black waterfall-waves, elegant and shining. After that it had pretty much been obvious.

He'd watched Himawari out of an honest desire to know what had so captivated Watanuki: why _her, _why not any of the other butterfly-delicate fluttering presences that seemed in such damn abundance? Himawari, _sunflower; _he supposed she was brilliant enough. She certainly had Watanuki's…uh…zest and exuberance, although generally less dramatic and more joyful. But still…?

And then one day he got it. And he thought, _okay. _

Sometimes Dômeki wondered. Caught expressions from Yûko-san always meant something, and there had been many of those. And it was strange—how something in his bow would _stir _at her arrival, walking to or from some everyday place to another everyday place—the untouched strings sang for some spirit or another. Perhaps there was something odd about Himawari Kunogi. Or, no, there was no 'perhaps' about it. Even if there was nothing to that strange sensation and suspicion, anyone like _that_ was out of the ordinary. Then again, Dômeki wondered about a lot of things.

_I'm so happy you and Watanuki are such good friends!_ went Himawari's cheerful misconception.

Like that. Dômeki wondered about that.

And so Dômeki decided, one day, that watching was not enough.


End file.
